Reception
by froodlemonkey
Summary: When he was fourteen, Simon walked into Hell for the first time.


When he was fourteen, Simon walked into Hell for the first time, He carried an out-dated pre-paid TracPhone, and he carried it in his backpack.

He slipped unnoticed through the throngs of sweatpants-wearing customers at the Eeriemat, paid six dollars and sixty-six cents to the tiny green imp who lived in the coin slot of Dryer Sechs, and wriggled his way into the metal drum, emerging a few moments later on the arid plains of Tartarus.

The Donald, wearing the blue and green jumpsuit of the Netherworld's janitorial staff, gave him a sour look as he passed and jabbed his trash-collecting spear viciously into the ground. Simon ignored him; he had long since ceased to feel bad about the villians whose plans he foiled, or their eventual fates.

At the towering black gates that marked the entrance to the infernal city of Dis, he gained entry by bribing the pulsating mass of eyeballs, antlers and tenacles with several slices of angel food cake. It was home-made, fresh that morning from the bakery counter at Grandma's Kitchen, and Simon had remembered to include several plastic forks and wet wipes in the bag.

The sounds of enthusiastic mastication followed him as he walked a path paved with the crushed hopes of a hundred thousand college students who had honestly believed that they would find work in their chosen fields after graduation. Their dreams were long since pulverised into a fine sand, but Simon trod lightly anyway.

Satan's throne room was enormous, with a ceiling that was lost in the sulphurous shadows overhead, and walls decorated with skulls arranged in concentric patterns to form larger and still larger skulls. (Years later, an aspiring film director named Christopher Nolan would negotiate the sale of his immortal soul in this very room, and this pattern would eventually inspire him to make Inception. Satan would scream and rage at being denied his share of the box office takings, and a policy was immediately implemented that required all meetings between the Damned and humanity to take place in grey, featureless conference rooms, to prevent a repeat of what the lower orders of Demons referred to as "Nolangate".)

Simon unshouldered his backpack and laid it down on an altar sculpted from coagulated virgin blood. The altar had been one of the artists earlier pieces, and the blood had never quite set properly, so his already-tattered bag aquired a few new reddish-brown stains in the process.

"You need to stop," he told Satan, who lounged in his dreadful throne (it was encrusted with rhinestones and lurid purple plush, and the mere sight of it had been known to send mortals mad from sheer cosmic horror). "It was kind of funny at first, but you're just being annoying now."

"I am sure I don't know what you mean," said Satan, in a tone of voice that implied he knew very well what Simon meant, and was tremendously amused by it. Simon sighed, and pulled the enormous phone from his newly-bloodied backpack.

"I'm not going to sell you my soul," he said, "So you can stop manifesting demonic entities every time I try to text my name or program my number into a cute girl's phone."

Satan laughed. Simon flushed.

"It's not funny!" he snapped. "The last girl I really liked was eaten by a Hellhound right after texting me!"

Satan continued to laugh, the cavernous room shaking with the force of his diabolical mirth. Liquified brimstone leaked from the corners of his eyes, and he wiped at them with one taloned hand.

"You should have seen your face!" he gasped, when he could eventually speak, then, abruptly serious, he shifted forward on his hideous throne. "And I won't stop. I will plague you and every other Simon on your miserable planet for as long as humanity insists on using numerical keypads to form words." He thumped his armrest for emphasis. "The number of the beast is called that for a reason. It is my number, and every time someone in your world types it into their phone, the Hellion Telephonic Network crashes." He stood suddenly, towering over Simon, stamping his cloven hooves in rage. "You are distracting my employees and impeding our great work to steal the souls of mankind, and I will not stand for it!" He sat back. "Now, get out."

"If you don't stop, I'll make you stop," hissed Simon, but Satan was already losing interest.

"People say that to me all the time," he said. "You'll notice I'm still around." He made a dismissive gesture, and Simon was once again alone on the hard-baked earth of Tartarus. Seething with righteous indignation, he made his way through the tumble dyer-cum-portal, and back to Eerie.

That year, the Loyal Order of Corn made some judicious investments in a couple of upcoming toys and games from Japan. Pokemon fever spread quickly around the world, and by the time the little Digimon virtual toys arrived on the scene, the entire Hellion Telephonic Network had to be abandoned.


End file.
